Critic AA Gill dies weeks after his cancer revelation
Author, commentator and restaurant critic A.A. Gill has died at the age of 62, just three weeks after telling the world he had been diagnosed with ‘an embarrassment of cancer, the full English’.
In what proved to be his final restaurant column, the Sunday Times writer and ex-husband of Britain’s Home Secretary Amber Rudd, described his condition with characteristic humour, saying: ‘I have a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy.’ The father-of-four also used the review to announce he intended to marry his partner of 23 years, Nicola Formby. It is not known whether they had time to marry before he died. Gill was best-known for his restaurant reviews, which could be viciously barbed. He had written for the Sunday Times since 1993, combining waspish TV reviews and food writing with the occasional reportage from war zones and refugee camps.
He was born Adrian Anthony Gill in Edinburgh in 1954. He wrote his first article for society magazine Tatler in 1991, which documented his time in rehab for alcoholism. He moved to The Sunday Times in 1993.
He is survived by his nineyear-old twins with Ms Formby, Isaac and Edith. He also leaves two children, Flora, 26, and Alasdair, 23, from his marriage to Mrs Rudd.
Mail on Sunday columnist Piers Morgan wrote last night: ‘RIP AA Gill. He trashed me for 20 years but always with magnificently eloquent savagery and an irritating kernel of truth.’